There seems to be a lot of confusion in the comments about what Dell is doing with this Laptop. Here are some observations that I've made:<p>* The image is custom, but it is maintained by Canonical, and one <i>can</i> download Ubuntu independently and then enable a bunch of Dell PPAs for hardware support (see <a href="http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/" rel="nofollow">http://hwe.ubuntu.com/uds-q/dellxps/</a>).<p>* Dell <i>is</i> contributing to OSS with this project. They have, with Canonical and the manifacturer, already built open source touch-pad drivers that seem to be working very well (a rarity on Linux).<p>* Selling an OS-free website is actually doing the Linux community a disservice. The reason is that it takes time and fidgeting in order to make everything work on Linux (and you can, in fact, screw up your computer if you don't set up fans correctly, for example), and the average developer (and, of course, any other user) doesn't want to waste time making suspend function when they can be working. For this reason, desktop Linux will <i>not</i> gain any significant market share if it is not pre-installed. This project will raise the Linux desktop market share, and thus encourage others to do something similar.<p>* This project started as a pilot in order for Dell to gauge interest, and they deemed it having enough potential to actually launch. The buzz from Dell (really, the "Project Sputnik" blog) is that if it is successful, there <i>might</i> be a follow-up.<p>With all that said, I will still <i>not</i> be buying this computer. The high-end version that they're selling is too expensive because of a large SSD (still too expensive), while only having 4GB of RAM. In the age of streaming and Dropboxes, I'd rather keep $200 and have 128GB SSD with 8GB RAM. Plus the screen is mediocre (although the keyboard feels amazing, I tried it at Best Buy).<p>Edit: Added newlines.